Kevin Hammond
Functional Programming, Properties, Parallelism
Kevin Hammond is a professor of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, where he leads the functional programming research group. His research interests lie in programming language design and implementation, with a focus on parallelism and real time properties of functional languages, including modelling and reasoning about extra-functional properties. In total, he has published around 100 research papers, books and articles, and held over 20 national and international research grants, totalling around £11M of research funding. He was a member of the Haskell design committee, co-designed the Hume real-time functional language, and is co-editor of the main reference text on parallel functional programming.
Past Activities
Code BEAM STO 2018
12.25 - 12.50
The Robots are Coming: Failure is not an Option!
Autonomous robots have the potential to change the world as we know it, freeing up humans from mundane tasks (or as we like to term them, "jobs").
But how do we know that the robots will do what we want them to do, and how can we ensure that they will not misbehave in unexpected ways?
This talk will explore some new ideas around understanding the plans that are used to control robotics systems, using the power of functional programming and high-level functional abstractions to ensure that the actions that a robot carries out do what was originally intended, even in the presence of unexpected situations or unpredictable events.
No actual robots will be hurt in the course of the talk.
Code BEAM STO 2018
17.45 - 18.30
Panel discussion on the trends in research
Some of the earliest Erlang adopters were Universities, using the language semantics to teach aspects of computer science. This resulted in research projects and collaboration focusing on type systems, tooling, static analysis, property based testing, all overlapping with classic themes such as VM enhancements, concurrency, distribution, scalability, reliability and multi-core. Whilst lots has been achieved, the challenges faced by the software industry keeps on evolving, as does the hardware and infrastructure they run our systems on. In this panel, Torben Hoffmann will be leading a discussion on how the Industry and Universities can work together to keep research thriving, accessible, cutting edge and relevant.